Far Near Author:John Burroughs Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill NEW GLEANINGS IN OLD FIELDS ONE of the good signs of the times is the interest our young people are taking in the birds, and the numerous clubs and soc... more »ieties that are being formed throughout the country for bird protection and bird study. In my youth but little was heard about the birds. They were looked upon as of small account. Many of them were treated as the farmer's natural enemies. Crows and all kinds of hawks and owls were destroyed whenever chance offered. I knew a farmer who every summer caught and killed all the red-tailed hawks he could. He stood up poles in his meadows, upon the tops of which he would set steel traps. The hawks, looking for meadow-mice, would alight upon them and be caught. The farmer was thus slaying some of his best friends, as these large hawks live almost entirely upon mice and other vermin. The redtail, or hen-hawk, is very wary of a man with a gun, but he has not yet learned of the danger that lurks in a steel trap on the top of a pole. If a strict account could be kept with our crows and hawks for a year, it would be found at the end of that time that most of them had a balance to their credit. They do us more good than injury. A few of them, such as the fish crow, the sharp-shinned hawk, Cooper's hawk, and the duck hawk, are destructive to song-birds and wild fowl; but the others subsist mainly upon insects and vermin. One August, when I was a boy, I remember a great flight of sparrow hawks, — so called, I suppose, because they rarely if ever catch sparrows. They were seen by the dozen, hovering above and flitting about the meadows. On carefully observing them, I found they were catching grasshoppers,— the large, fat ones found in the meadows in late summer. They would poise on the wing twenty or thirty feet above the ground, af...« less